Today we are releasing a major update of FollowFriday.com. We continue to fight the spam on the #followfriday hashtag, so we are changing the ranking rules to reward those shoutouts which are more spontaneous. We are introducing a new points based algorithm where each followfriday recommendation is worth 50 points divided by the number of users recommended in that tweet. So if you receive a followfriday recommendation which only mentions you in the tweet, then you will get 50 points. If the tweet mentions 2 users you will each receive 25 points, and so on.
Points = 50 / (Number of mentions in the tweet)
As part of this new algorithm we have stopped taking into account retweets and thank you recommendations. In this way we don't value users who abuse these techniques.
We are also introducing a big infrastructure improvement which now allows us to calculate your exact position in the global ranking even if it exceeds 1000. So now our widgets have more sense and reflect your precise position.
Ranking Rules: http://www.followfriday.com/content/ranking-rules